Gamer's Delight

Since graduating, my days have been spent between job hunting, reading, and playing video games, and roughly in that order. Toss in some minor projects here and there that I've put off since moving to focus on school, and you've got what I do in my free time. OKOK, I've also caught up on True Blood, but I digress.

During my video gaming fun times, I've noticed one thing that makes me truly happy: complete customization over characters and their attributes. I LOVE seeing "SNOWDEN #70" when I play Gretzky 2005, seeing SNOWDEN be the third ranked scorer behind Peter Forsberg and Joe Sakic, and love it even more when I establish myself in the ranking of penalty minutes. SNOWDEN is 2nd line right wing and kicks absolute butt; Private Nichols of Call of Duty 3 is currently laying dead in a ditch somewhere the French countryside. Why? Because he's not Mike Snowden. Nuff' said.

Unless the game is based holistically around the central character and it's personality, complete customization allows for a much more intense experience. Take Kratos from "God of War", for example. After obliterating a room of centaurs, sirens, skeleton warriors, creepy flying things, massive one eyed fatties AND a giant, yelling "KRAAAAAAAATOS, motha effa!" is minimally appropriate; yelling "Mike!", however, is quite a turn off. In fact, I believe that if Kratos could hear me yelling "Mike Snowden, bitches!", he would take a page from A-Ha and take me on, God of War style.

Don't get me wrong, there are a good amount of games that shouldn't allow too much customization, for instance, Halo and it's sequels, because the story continues around Master Chief, not some arbitrarily named character like "Joseph Steven", but there are a good amount of games that might be more marketable with full customization. I think that Call of Duty is one such game because when I play a game, I get extremely attached to the character (hint hint: my middle name is not Kratos, if you know me on Facebook) and in Call of Duty, if I could make my character, I would be a helluva lot less careless with how I run in to a barn to clear it of Nazis.

Just saying.